Poetic Justice. I love great, ringing, emotion evoking and flowing poetry and I certainly am a fan of justice. As a devotee and admirer of poetic justice, I especially love watching the Bushies scramble frantically trying to plug the leaks in the benchmarks dike. It is amazing to watch them.
The plotting and planning in the run up to the release of the latest National Intelligence Estimate must have been interesting. They couldn’t have Barney eat the damn thing. Oh how they must have yearned for the glory days of the lead up to Operation Iraqi Liberation, er Freedom and the Pentagon’s Iraq Study Group for the Manipulation of Intelligence. But this was an NIE document, not an ISGMI cheat sheet.
So, of course the propaganda mill began churning out speeches for Dubya to present to friendly venues, punctuated by his infamous vacuous grin and robotic arm gestures, obviously written by people not much more intelligent than Dubya himself. They certainly did not understand much more about history than Dubya himself if they thought a twisted and historically bogus comparison between extracting ourselves from sectarian violence in a fractured power vacuum we created in the middle of the Arabian Peninsula and the pullout from Vietnam, would reflect favorably on the nebulous, indefinable, goalless Bush policy of unending, ever spreading war with its attendant eternal death, destruction and contribution to the probable decline of the Project for the New Americn Cenury Empire. And who in his/her right mind would believe the Halliburton etal, profit and corruption driven raping of Iraqi reconstruction is anything like the orderly, planned, cooperative rebuilding of Japan after WWII? Certainly not respectable historians and certainly not the Japanese who had some objection to that comparison.
In the modern vernacular, “What was up with that?” Were these ridiculous fabrications of reality supposed to be more credible than the assessment of a myriad of intelligence professionals? Nevertheless, it was the plan. That and lots of republicans traveling to Iraq and reporting back on the Indiana-like markets and the real bargain of native Iraqi rugs. And let us not forget the coup de gras of having General Petraeus try to “clean the NIE up a little,” with a nudge here or there that made temporary and purely military “progress against al Qaida in al Anbar Provence” spinnable as raison’ de etre for continuing this madness.
They were possibly having some success with this campaign in advance of the White-House-written Petraeus report due for release in mid September accompanied by, all evidence to the contrary, claims of political success in meeting benchmarks set by congress.
Enter the Government Accounting Office draft report on progress in Iraq.
In an entity as vast as the civil service apparatus of the federal government there have to be a few or maybe a few thousand ethical, patriotic people who are in a position to release truth to the public and choose to do so. Someone leaked the GAO assessment of the situation in Iraq as it actually is with progress in only three of the eighteen benchmarks being even partially met and the military situation as, well not so great This before the Bushies could get their hands on it and spin it ala White House Fantasyland Scenarios of love and light and functioning democratic institutions totally capable of bringing order out of the endlessly complicated morass of ever shifting sectarian alliances and re-alliances and constant 130 degree hell of bombings, torture, kidnappings, murders, lack of water, power and food and general mayhem that is post-invasion Iraq.
The Bushies cannot control all of the civil servants in the federal bureaucracy. Thank god for that. Tony Snow is spinning the GAO report as just a draft thing that may not be as accurate now as it might be in its final form after input from the White House. What a laugh that is. An objective analysis that has not yet been tainted by the obviously biased and agenda driven hand of the White House is somehow not as credible now as after, oh maybe the addition of the text of a Bush speech to the VFW that is laden with historical distortions and outright lies? Need I answer that rhetorical question?
They can’t contain the truth forever. The government is too big. The government contains more and more disillusioned, dedicated civil servants who will feel increasingly that it is their duty to expose the corruption of Bush and his cronies and handlers. The Bushies don’t have enough fingers to plug the dike forever.
